The Horrible Balls
by awasteworld
Summary: After the cancellation of their ABC sitcom, Kermit and Ms. Piggy's struggling (yet BDSM-charged) relationship is interrupted by Team Rocket's nefarious plans.


Kermit is reaching for her.

Her eyes, swirling porcine jewels of tears and cerulean, will not leave his. Not in this now which goes on forever.

Still reaching. Their white-gloved hands holding her down, wrenching her away from him. Their dark suits emblazoned across their breasts with a scarlet "R."

Kermit asks himself what it could mean.

Revenge? Repugnance?

Regret?

He reaches, indefinitely sealed in that moment like a museum exhibit. Like a hawk diving after a scurrying shrew, taxidermied together to preserve that sublime instant of predatory terror.

Regret is what he feels.

Regret that they had left it where they did.

Last night, or as far as Kermit knows, a thousand years ago, in New York:

"It was humiliating, Kermit."

She wasn't calling him _Kermie_. He knew what that meant.

"It was supposed to be a breath of fresh air for our brand, Ms. Piggy! And the mockumentary style is a beloved genre! _The Office_? _Parks and Recreation_? _Modern Family_? I don't know what went wrong, but we were doing good-"

"I'll tell you what you did wrong!" She was pacing, still in her heels from their trip to The Comedy Cellar to see Fozzie. It was his first set since ABC cancelled the show. He had bombed, drunk. Bitter and slurring. "It's that you call it a BRAND. We aren't a BRAND, Kermit."

"I know, I was just-"

"I'm not a brand . . . I'm a PIG. And I'm supposed to be your partner. You're supposed to listen to me."

Her heels clacked to a halt, punctuating her words. Kermit's throat felt sour and choked with pain, but the rest of him stirred with lust. His scales moistened, as they always did when she berated and abused him. Part of him hated that he couldn't help it, couldn't help but relish her domineering mania and the agony it caused him. On some level, he decided he must believe he deserved it.

But he couldn't admit that, so his floppy green arms began flailing around the penthouse.

"Listen to you? LISTEN to you? Ms. Piggy all I do is LISTEN to you! Do you even notice? Everything I do is about supporting you, and elevating you, and making you feel like the cherished star I KNOW YOU ARE. And still, still you needle me. Huffing and snorting and belittling. Maybe the sitcom did feel like an ill-conceived knockoff that tainted a beautiful legacy! Maybe I did sell out what made us special in an attempt to strangle a few more bucks out of a beloved institution! But you know what? At least I tried SOMETHING. What do you do? What have you REALLY done since that Miss Bogen County beauty contest that didn't DIRECTLY come from me?"

He waited for her retaliation. Eager. Hungry for it, even. The screaming, the blows sending him sailing across the room like a rag doll. The barrage of kisses after, as she held him down, her soft pink flesh billowing over his fragile amphibian body like one giant breast. Her moans and quivers as his long, prehensile tongue explored every salty inch of her.

But it didn't come. She just sat and let her hair fall over her face.

"Ms. Piggy?"

Her eyes were on the floor. Through it, really. Looking into some cold and distant place.

"Wait, I'm sorry . . ."

She stood as he approached, turned away and clacked towards the front hallway. He chased after her, finding her working her arms into her coat.

"Please, I didn't – look at me, please."

She drew a long breath through her snout. She looked at him, one hand on the handle of the front door.

"Kermie . . ."

But that was all she was able to say before they were upon her. White gloves, dark suits, shaded faces.

The baffling "R."

Kermit was reaching for her.

A red-and-white ball sailed through the air and struck him in the head. A flash of brilliant fire-colored light sealed this moment for eternity.

Kermit is reaching for her.

[*]

The light is all-consuming. Kermit feels it surging through his extremities, ringing through his bones and stinging his nerves like a parade of electric needles. Jolted back into linear time, materializing out of fire-colored light, he gasps as air fills his vacant lungs.

Blasted out of that purgatory in which he had been accosted, he feels reborn – but not reborn, reconstructed. Reconstituted, drawn with lines of energy and atom, he tries to perceive the blurring divisions between his green skin and his unfamiliar surroundings. They are fuzzy at first, out of focus, and he is uncertain if this is a consequence of his eyes being bleary or if his actual matter is taking shape from whatever strange dimension had ensconced him in New York.

He has no time to process any of this, because a deep, calm voice asks:

"Would you like some tea?"

Details swim into Kermit's awareness. He realizes he is sitting on a small, gray cushion. A porcelain pot, hand-painted with long, blue dragons and gulping red carp, emanates heat from the center of a stout, polished table that lays on the floor in the Japanese style. Near the room's only window, a pressed business suit with a green vest hangs from a hook on the ceiling, almost as if it contained some broad-shouldered ghostly sentinel.

Across the table, cross-legged on another gray cushion and draped in a white kimono, a square-jawed man with pristinely slicked hair gives Kermit a half a smile. It is not a comforting smile. In it are a deluge of unspoken threats and warnings.

"Where – Where am I? How long was I-" Kermit sees the red-and-white ball in the man's hirsute hand and swallows. "What is that thing?"

"One question at a time, my little green friend."

The man places the red-and-white ball on the table. He lifts the teapot and fills both he and Kermit's cups.

"Where is Ms. Piggy?" Kermit manages, resenting the endearing lilt his voice naturally carries. Wishing he could intimidate.

The man reaches into his kimono, producing another red-and-white ball. Kermit flinches again, reminded of the horrible reaching eternity in which he had been sealed after his last encounter with such an object.

"She's right here."

"What are you talking about?"

"Drink your tea."

"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?"

A paper wall slides open and two dark-suited men with white gloves and red Rs step in, taking purposeful strides towards Kermit. The man stops them with a raised hand. He shoos them like insects. The wall slides closed. Kermit is alone with him again.

"My name is Giovanni. I'm a businessman. You work for me now."

"Just . . . tell me Ms. Piggy is safe. Tell me where she is."

"She's exactly where you were before I let you out. She's inside a Pokeball."

"Inside a-?"

"Right, I suppose you've never been to Kanto before. These incredible little devices allow collectors and trainers everywhere to capture and keep Pokemon, no matter what their size, preserving the creatures in a hibernative energy state. Miraculous stuff, really. I forget to think about and appreciate little things like that, sometimes."

Giovanni turns the ball in his hand, the ball where Ms. Piggy remains frozen in timeless terror, and furrows his brow in mirthful contemplation. Kermit seethes. The steam winding up to the ceiling from his untouched tea mocks the rage boiling in his belly with its insistent tranquility. His face crumples, becoming a puckered fist.

"There's a boy," Giovanni says, his voice taking on a smoldering quality, still staring into the Pokeball as if trying to divine some arcane wisdom from it. "There's a boy named Ash. Some little hayseed from Pallet Town but . . . still, he has thwarted more of my plans than the entirety of Kanto's national and regional police combined. Team Rocket has tried fighting him with every kind of Pokemon . . ."

A bell rings in Kermit's mind. Beyond the blinding anger, a small light of recognition: The R. Team Rocket. But there are still so many questions.

"Giovanni, what's a Pokemon?"

". . . Rock type. Water Type. Normal Type. Poison type. You name it, he just – he just seems unstoppable. Him and that infernal Pikachu! I realized, if I wanted to take Ash down, and take him down permanently, I'd have to fight him with something other than Pokemon."

"Like . . . guns?"

"Muppets, you idiot. I'm going to fight him with Muppets."

"But, Ms. Piggy and I, we're just . . . We're just nice! We don't fight! We just like to sing, and laugh, and learn-"

"But you WILL fight. And you WILL win. That is, unless you'd like me to just seal you in one of these forever."

The red-and-white ball. Kermit averts his eyes, but steels himself. If this is what it takes to see her again, so be it. He reaches for his cup on the table.

"Okay, Giovanni. I'll fight Ash for you. And Whatever a Pikachu is."

Giovanni claps once, his sickening smile returning.

"Of course you will! Now, we just-"

"I will say though," Kermit adds, lifting the cup. "You'd think a _business man_ of your caliber would be able to deal with a ten-year-old boy without kidnapping a couple of beloved American icons to do his dirty work. But . . . that's none of my business."

Kermit takes a long sip of tea, and the fire-colored light dismantles him again.

[*]

Locked again in an elastic instant, Kermit is sipping. The warm, fragrant tea sits against his green lips. The smooth mug, the striking sunlight, the paper walls. It is all now and it is all forever, part of his consciousness and his whole consciousness, an irreducibility always approaching yet never reached.

Minutes later, or millennia later, it explodes again in the supernova of light, but this time – as Kermit's body's atoms are reconstituted - all is chaos.

Giovanni's voice is the first he recognizes:

"Tea Lizard, use Flail!"

Kermit turns to face the businessman, confused. Giovanni is wild in the eyes, yelling through his teeth. He is wearing the pressed suit with the green vest. It is disheveled now, stained with sweat.

"What's _flail_? I don't-"

Kermit is interrupted by a shrill child's voice behind him:

"Squirtle, use Water Gun!"

He wheels around, barely registering the isolated woodland surroundings to which he was transported in the terrible ball. A stout, round-headed turtle with vibrant blue skin stands on its hind legs before him. Kermit tries to defuse the situation with a joke.

"Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here. Sorry if I jumped when I saw you. I think I'm just a little shell-shocked!"

The blue creature tips its head to the side.

"Squirtle."

"Huh?"

An impossible stream of highly pressurized water emerges from Squirtle's open mouth, pitching Kermit through the air and filling his lungs. He lands, with bone-cracking force, against a gnarled tree root, wretching tepid water and gasping for breath. Fighting delirium, he lifts his head to try to locate his attacker, but instead – through the rainbow-streaked corona of mist thrown into the air by the monster's brutal blast – he sees her.

He tries to call her name, but can barely ribbit. Giovanni's booming order covers his feeble, shuddering sound.

"Piggy Princess, use Body Slam!"

Kermit sees her squat, a surging strength rippling through her thick pink thighs below the hem of the svelte black cocktail dress in which she'd been captured. Her face is feral, flushed and tense in a way Kermit knows all too well. Darts of pain pierce any muscle he attempts to move, and paired with his lover's exerted concentration, evoke vivid memories of a the pain they shared together – that which shared a border with pleasure.

She propels herself into the air with her powerful haunches, blonde curls fanning into a gilded halo, limbs outstretched. She has never been more beautiful. Kermit, delirious, blinks in and out of memory: Her breath on his inner thigh/Giovanni's maniacal laugh/Her palm snapping electric against the moistened scales of his cheek/A dark-haired boy calling out in warning/Her hands around his throat as her lips meet his/Squirtle turning as he's bathed in shadow, too late.

The blue turtle disappears underneath her body as the impact resonates in the Earth. The boy – Ash, it must be, Kermit realizes – wails.

"Squirtle, no!"

Giovanni beats his fist against his vested chest.

"THAT is what you get, Ash! You are no match for my MUPPETS!"

As she lifts herself off of the unconscious Squirtle, she sees Kermit for the first time. He tries to smile at her through the pain.

"KERMIE!"

Outstretched arms, a smile of relief. All the resentment and anger that had polluted the air between them, all the pettiness and passive-aggression, the shame and the love fermented into bitterness – it evaporates.

Ash's voice, from what sounds like a different continent:

"Pikachu, use thunderbolt!"

A scurrying flash of neon yellow appears in the periphery of Kermit's vision. His attention is drawn to it almost magnetically as sparks, like fireflies, begin to swirl around its obscenely rose-colored cheeks.

"Piiii . . . Kaaa . . ."

"Ms. Piggy, look ou-!"

"CHUUUUUUUUUU!"

The rodent's eponymous call vanishes as an explosive percussion vibrates the air. A white-hot bolt splits space. The sudden fragrance of bacon and ozone.

She falls next to him, spasms rocking her body, smoke rising from the singed edges of her hair, the cocktail dress. He can only speak the word "No."

Kermit is reaching for her.

Giovanni rises above the canopy of trees, hanging from the basket of a hot-air balloon decorated with the accursed, bloody R. He points to Ash.

"This is not the last you will see of me! Mark my words, Ash. You will pay for this!"

"Let him have it, Pikachu!"

Kermit does not even hear the second bolt. Or Giovanni's enigmatic last words _Looks like Team Rocket's blasting off again_ as the hot air balloon careens into the clouds cloaked in billowing flames. Or the tentative footsteps of a ten-year-old boy approaching where he lays prone next to his lover, broken together.

"Kermie, my heart . . . My-"

"Ssh, it's going to be okay. I just have to – It'll be okay."

"I don't think I can . . ." Her eyes loll blank for an instant.

"NO! Stay with me!"

"Kermie . . ."

He begins to look around, frantically. For anything. The futility strikes him suddenly, turning his spine to ice. The madness of it. The horror of it. He meets the watery, black eyes of Pikachu.

"You!"

He tries to stand, but a violent agony wracks his body. His leg is broken. He collapses.

"Pika?"

A column of smoke reaches into the sky from Giovanni's crash site miles away, a black tentacle of furious death. Ashes drop like snowflakes as Ash finds the courage to say:

"You can talk?"

Kermit turns his stinging neck toward the boy, prepared to unleash the fullness of his rage, the depth of his sadness and pain – but the eyes he meets are shallow, innocent and silly. A child. A scared child. A soldier in a war he neither started nor understands.

"Do you have them?" Kermit rasps.

"Have what?"

"The balls, Ash. Those red-and-white balls. Those impossible little balls that take us outside of time."

"Pikachu?"

"Do you mean these?"

A small hand, clad in fingerless gloves and sporting dirty fingernails, extends. The edges of Kermit's vision are going dark, fading into shadows of shock as his adrenaline wanes. In Ash's palm are two smooth, gleaming Pokeballs.

"Use them," Kermit hears himself saying. "Use them on us."

His slender, green arms wrap around her shoulders. He whispers in her ear:

"I'm so sorry, Ms. Piggy. I didn't mean to-"

"Kermie . . ."

"-in New York, I was just afraid. I was afraid of disappointing you and failing you but-"

"Kermie . . ."

"-you are so important, and so beautiful, and the only thing I have ever wanted is-"

"Kermie, listen to me."

He can feel her heart fluttering, the beats farther and farther apart, echo against his skin.

"Okay. Okay, Ms. Piggy. I'm listening."

"I love you, Kermie."

His grip tightens. A single beat.

"I love you too, Ms-"

Twin supernovas. They dissolve into fire-colored light.

Kermit is holding her. She is holding him.

Time wraps around itself, and around itself, and around itself again.

[*]

Pikachu picks at grass absently with his tiny paws, breaking the little blades apart with deliberate focus as he listens to the waves crash against the peninsula – destroying it, beating it into sand, with the same deliberate focus.

When he looks up, Ash's arm is arched back. The trainer pitches forward, straining every muscle in his wiry body. Following as best he can with his eyes, Pikachu can identify two small Pokeballs just before they vanish in diamond puffs of surf.

"Pikachu!"

"Be quiet."

"Pika?"

The small Pokemon creeps up to his master's side, touches the filthy sole of a sneaker worn smooth by miles and miles of walking, searching, fighting. Ash's eyes never leave the water as he speaks.

"I . . . I want to be the very best. That no one ever was. To catch them, that's my real test . . . and to train them is my cause, but . . . I've travelled across this land, searching far and wide . . . getting these Pokemon to understand the power that's inside. Pokemon . . . you gotta catch 'em all . . . but Pikachu, that doesn't mean you always have to keep them."

Pikachu tries to think of what to say.

"Pikachu."

Ash nods, puts his hands in his pockets, and closes his eyes.


End file.
